This invention relates to shopping carts and more specifically to an alarm and alarm system designed to deter theft of shopping carts.
Grocery stores, shopping malls and plazas, garden and hardware centers and the like conventionally employ numerous shopping carts to facilitate handling and transportation of goods by customers to and from check-out points and to parked vehicles. Such carts are usually fairly expensive since they are very durably made of relatively expensive materials, such as stainless steel or chrome steel, to withstand constant strenuous use by customers. Because of the large number of such carts that may be typically employed by a single grocery store, and the large volume of business that may be conducted during business hours in that area, it is usually relatively simple to remove a shopping cart from the premises without the removal being detected by store personnel. Such large numbers of shopping carts are stolen each year that shopping cart thefts represent a significant part of the overhead of a number of businesses.
Systems proposed in the past for reducing the numbers of stolen shopping carts include anti-theft devices, recovery systems, and deterrent systems.
Anti-theft devices typically are used to physically immobilize the shopping cart or prevent it from being pushed in a straight line once the shopping cart is removed beyond a predetermined boundary. Such anti-theft systems are taught in the following U.S. Patents: U.S. Pat. No. 4,772,880 to Goldstein et al; U.S. Pat. No. 4,591,175 to Upton et al; and U.S. Pat. No. 4,242,668 to Herzog. One problem with such the systems is that, while they may indeed prevent theft of the shopping cart, injuries may potentially result when the shopping cart suddenly stops, thus exposing the grocery store owner to liability.
Recovery systems do not actually prevent theft of the shopping carts but are used to try and recover the carts that are taken beyond the boundary of the store parking lot and abandoned. Typically, a transmitter in the shopping cart is used to transmit a high frequency that is not audible but detectable only with appropriate receiver equipment. A shopping cart retrieval crew in a vehicle containing the receiver is needed to track down the abandoned shopping cart. Such a recovery system having a VHF beacon transmitter housed in the handle of a shopping cart is shown in U.S. Pat. No. 4,868,544 to Havens.
Deterrent systems typically include an alarm in the shopping cart that sounds when the shopping cart is removed beyond a predetermined boundary. Such a deterrent alarm is taught in U.S. Pat. No. 3,157,871 to Umanoff. This alarm system includes a receiver and alarm included in the shopping cart basket itself, decreasing the effective capacity of the shopping cart.
Therefore, a need still exists for a small, safe, and effective system for reducing the numbers of stolen shopping carts.